Golden Grams of Goodness: Nugget Hunting Tales

[Jim_Alaska]

Another great example of how it was done in the old days. Thanks once again Lanny, great story.

[Lanny]

Thanks Jim, much appreciated, and I'm sure you have a story or two you've heard about how the old-timers did things in Alaska.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Here's a story I wrote a couple of years back . . .

Ancient Troughs

The day was warm, but the sizzling, dog-days of summer were long gone. It had taken until around eleven in the morning to get rid of the chill in the shade of the pine-covered slopes. The butterflies were long gone, the songbirds too, and only a solitary crow or the occasional hawk drifted across the cobalt blue sky of the mountain fastness that framed my view.

That late in the mining year, I finally had the green light to work some bedrock I’d wanted to get at all season. A lot of the bedrock was now covered in water, but there was one pie-shaped piece that was mostly dry. (But before I relate the main part of my story, I need to back up a bit and say that I’d already had a shot at the surrounding gold producing area.) The bedrock I'd targeted to hunt sat down in a sort of oblong bowl with steep walls on two sides. As seepage from the mountainside was steadily adding more water to drown the bedrock, I was eager to get detecting before the entire area turned into a duck pond, but I’d only got permission to detect around the rim of the bowl, not the base of it.

Well, I’d found a few small nuggets on the rim I've mentioned, nothing over two grams in size, and the rest of the targets were the usual suspects: sharp metal shavings from excavator buckets and tracks. Oh, and I did find the tip of an old pick where an old working from the 1800’s intersected the modern-day dig. To elaborate, those old boys had sunk a shaft down to bedrock through some nasty boulders, then tunnelled about thirty feet along the bedrock before quitting. Moreover, as there was no evidence of a bedrock drain in the exposed excavation, they must have quit due to water problems, the same problem that was threatening to deny me a chance at working the bedrock I wanted to get at.

Examining the aforementioned bedrock, I noticed that most of it was a reddish color, with some tan to whitish colored bands running through it, and man was that bedrock hard. However, it was really torn up in some places where it would break, but in other spots, the bucket’s teeth had just skipped over and scraped across the surface.

In spots like that, there's either gold or almost nothing it seems. So, not knowing what to expect, I fired-up the Gold Bug Pro.( I’d also packed in my Minelab 5000, but I left it in the bag to check the bedrock later after I’d worked it with the pro.)

Off to side of the pie-shaped piece of bedrock, I saw a little pocket that was half filled with water and thought I’d try that first. Immediately I got a signal. The pocket was about twice the size of my boot sole, so I was shocked to hit a target so soon. The meter read iron, but that bedrock had ironstone all over the place, so that wasn’t out of the ordinary. I fished around in the hole with my wand-magnet, and it came out looking like a steel-quilled porcupine! I scanned again and still had a signal. I hit it again with the wand and this time some chunks of magnetite were on the magnet, but no more steel. So, I scanned again, and the signal sang sweetly.

Well, I don’t know if you’ve chased targets in the water or not, but anything heavy drops as soon as you disturb it, so I decided that I’d build myself a little dam of sticky, heavy clay to stop the seepage from getting into that little pocket. I got some of that nice gooey clay and packed it all around the pocket, then I went to work with my scoop to bail out the water. I got the tip of the coil in the pocket and the meter jumped straight up into the 40 range. Well, whatever it was was something conductive, with a good chance of being gold. I scanned again and the reading on the meter held rock solid, no movement at all. Now, some hot rocks will ring up and hold in that range, but they’ll often bounce around a bit when you scan back and forth or across the target from a different angle, but this target pinned that meter steady. I rooted around with the scoop and scanned the contents under the coil. There was a nice, solid sound and the meter still read true as well. It didn’t take long to isolate the target, a round nugget of just over a gram.

Because of that early success, I kept at that same spot for a while. In the broken bedrock there were lots of little pockets that water was working its way into. I’d scan the pockets and if I got a signal, I’d build my clay dams and go to work bailing out the water so I wouldn’t have to worry about a target dropping deeper when I tried to dig it out. I spent close to an hour doing this and wound up with a nice pile of small nuggets in my bottle. I swirled the bottle close to my ear and heard the golden rumble of coarse gold.

I worked some places that were under about six inches of water as well and found a few more small ones that I then added to the bottle. Next, I went to work the bedrock that rose above water, the piece that ran back in a pie shape to the rim of the cut. This part was different from the broken bedrock. This bedrock was iron hard and there were bits of steel everywhere left from the bucket as it scraped and skipped its way across the bedrock.

However, what interested me were the places where I could still see some clay. In most of these spots where the clay was visible, there were little troughs running anywhere from a foot to three feet in length. They were cupped and rounded, and some of them still had river stones in them. The top run of boulders and river-run had been ripped off by the equipment in addition to as much bedrock as would fracture, but the troughs (from two to three inches deep, maybe three to four inches wide, with a maximum of five inches of depth in one spot) had escaped the efforts of the excavator buckets. (Maybe it was an ancient run under the looser, later-era bedrock?) I started to run my detector along one good looking trough and got nothing but bucket shavings that had been worked or transported into the mix.

I spotted another trough that ran at close to a 45-degree angle across one spot and decided I’d try it next. The first pass produced a broad signal. Now if you’ve read my earlier stories involving broad signals on bedrock, this detector effect gets my interest mighty quick. I took out my light pick and carefully started to loosen every bit of material in the trough where the broad signal was. I scraped up every bit of material and put it in my gold pan.

I scanned the pan and got a nice signal, so off I went to wash the material. What a great sight! Sassy, coarse gold littered the pan!! The broad signal came from a family of pickers with several gram nuggets thrown in for fun. I couldn’t believe it.

I scanned the trough where I’d removed the material and got a faint signal. I took my pick and bar and worked my way down. I scanned again and the signal was louder. I was finally able to break off a chunk of bedrock and it exposed a little pocket filled with clay and small river stones. I put everything in the pan and headed for water. Once again, coarse gold in the pan! I kept working the troughs, finding broad signals from time to time until the sun dropped behind the mountain. By that time, I could no longer get any signals with the Gold Bug Pro.

However, before it got too dark to see, I fired up the GPX 5000 with a small sniper coil and went to work. Booyahh! Deeper gold in some troughs that the Gold Bug couldn’t see. My little bottle was heavy!

To bring this story to a close, when I reported to the miners what I’d found, they put on a ripper tooth and took another three feet of bedrock, and they did very well indeed. Let’s just say it was worth it to them to tear their equipment up some . . .

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

This is from a couple of years ago, but I thought I'd share the story as it deals with why I pack two very different types of detectors when I'm working worked bedrock.

Black Bedrock Gold

A while back, I had the opportunity to work what I can only describe as an old placer cut. It wasn’t anywhere near the size of a regular placer pit, and the cut itself was only about fifteen feet deep, but however they’d figured it, they’d hit bedrock at that depth, yet the other excavations in the area had to go much deeper, 30-45 feet, to find that black bedrock.

I’d walked and driven past that cut numerous times on my way to a couple of larger workings upriver. So, one day when the clouds were keeping the summer day cooler, I decided to drop into the cut and have a sniff around with the GPX 5000 and the Gold Bug Pro.

In reference to the two detectors, and as I’ve been asked about this before, I’ll explain why I pack two very different machines when I’m nugget shooting. I don’t think anyone would argue that the GPX 5000 is a fantastic gold machine, and I have a tiny coil for it that’s a true sniper on small stuff, so why get outfitted with two different detectors when one will do the job? Well, the Bug Pro is a VLF machine, so it’s ability to ID iron is a real asset (vs. a pulse machine like the Minelab GPX which has quite limited ability to deal with iron vs. a top-of-the-line VLF, and as well, the Minelab has no meter system to give visual feedback).

As I do a lot of detecting where big equipment has shed all kinds of metallic slivers and chunks, the iron ID muscle of the Bug Pro is a huge plus. That ability to ID certainly comes in handy in spots like I was detecting that day, and in severe cases where there are heavy concentrations of bits of steel on the bedrock, I can sometimes find gold (if I know there’s a good chance that it’s shallow) by using the onboard discrimination circuitry of the Gold Bug. (The little Minelab X-Terra 705 is great for this as well, and has done the same job.)

In reference to discrimination mode, I believe everyone knows that depth is lost by using it in gold-bearing locations, but sometimes if there’s overwhelming trash, a loss of depth is secondary, especially when working bedrock. I mean, I know I can punch much deeper in all metal mode, but all metal means exactly that, and when bucket and track have continually worked a spot to grab dirt from the surface of the bedrock, the resulting signals can drive anyone crazy, especially me when I’m tired and getting cranky (It’s not just the bears that get cranky in the mountains!). Yes, a magnet helps clear an area, but if there’s clay present, which there always is where I’m currently working, the steel signals that are trapped and covered by it become a recipe for detecting insanity.

The day was pleasant. The damp, earthy smell of clay permeated the cut. A small seep was trickling water over the bedrock as it wound its way to a pool at the lowest part of the excavation. With the water wetting the bedrock in summer, a small squadron of tiny brown and orange butterflies were taking advantage of the free drinks. Every once in a while, a massive bluish-green dragon fly buzzed me getting a closer look at my face for some reason, its opalescent eyes and wings testament to Nature’s artistic genius; its flight capabilities testament to the insect’s unhindered mobility of flight or direction, an ability that significantly outperforms any of man’s weak attempts. The sky that day was partly cloudy with very little breeze, and the green timbered twin valleys I could see above the lip of the cut veed gently and beautifully into the main valley evidence of yet another marvel of Nature’s design genius.

The sides of the cut were littered with boulders of varying sizes. The bedrock itself sloped upward both directions from the pool, with the northern portion hosting a comb-like rise of friable rock, standing plates oriented perpendicularly to the bedrock base, sheets that varied from about a half inch to an inch and a half in width. There were pockets of clay either resting intact on the bedrock throughout the pit or ones whose motion was frozen in time when they’d oozed down the sides of the cut like tan, smooth, miniature glaciers.

I took the Bug Pro from the carrying bag and assembled it. It’s an nugget-shooting outfit that goes together in a hurry. It’s only time consuming feature, which is minimal, are the twin screws that attach the control box to the shaft handle. I turned the machine on and checked to ensure the batteries were good, then I started for the southern end of the cut. After I’d used the ground grab to balance, I started scrubbing the bedrock with the stock elliptical coil (I always buy coil covers for this reason).

The bedrock was quite smoothed off at that end of the cut, but I noticed there were pockets of clay deeper than the ones located at the pit’s center, or indeed at the northern end. I slowed down and scanned carefully. Not long after, I got a nice signal where a pocket of clay was trapped between two large plates of bedrock whose sides protruded just enough to stop the machines from getting it. By way of explanation, when a large placer operation is running, they are always concerned about volume; as well, they usually have excavators and dozers preparing a new cut, so time to chase small pockets is a luxury they don’t have, especially this far north where it’s always a race to get the gold before Old Man Winter ruins the party.

But, I’d better get back to my story. I took out my pick and scraped off about an inch of clay from the pocket’s surface, scanned it again, and the signal was much louder, but still displayed no ID on the signal meter. I scraped off more clay, scanned again, and this time the meter jumped into the sweet spot and held steady. At this point I knew it was either gold or one of the few hot rocks clever enough to act like gold. I removed more of the clay, scanned again, but the signal was gone. It was in the pile resting on the bedrock. I scooped the pile and ran it over the coil—a nice yelp! It didn’t take long to sort the target out, and a sassy 2.2gram nugget was soon in my hand. I pulled out the little plastic bottle from my pocket and gave that nugget a new home.

Continuing on the same line I hit another pocket of clay, smaller than the first. This time the signal was very sharp, sweet, and it boosted the meter into the sweet zone right away, so I knew the target had to be close to the surface. I liked my chances. Out popped a round nugget that hit the scales at just under two grams. It joined its brother in the bottle, and as I swirled the bottle those twins produced a nice golden growl. I kept at that end of the cut for a while; I even moved some of the boulders to see if anything was hiding under them, but I got blanked. So, I headed back the opposite way and came upon a little pool of water off to the side of the cut. There was a lot of clay in the area, so I took my time. Soon, I’d captured pewee; he weighed in at .6 of a gram, but he had a buddy too that had been on a workout program of some kind for he hit the scales at just over a gram.

I slowly kept working the bedrock until I hit the edges of the main pool. At this point I’d like to elaborate on another nice feature of the Gold Bug Pro; as the coils are waterproof, I slid the coil into the water. Moreover, because I had my mining boots on, I followed the coil to detect the bottom of that water. I was rewarded with two small pieces that totalled just under a gram. No matter where I went after that, there were no more signals, that is, until I swapped my Gold Bug Pro for the Minelab.

I went back over the bedrock with the GPX trying to see if I’d missed anything, and the Minelab did not disappoint. It sniffed out some deeper pieces that were down between plates that the Bug Pro didn’t have the punch to find. By the time I was done detecting, I had just over 8.5grams in the bottle, and what a growl those pieces made when I swirled the nuggets in the bottle by my ear. (In case you’re wondering why I spin the nuggets in the bottle, that tradition started many years ago way up north with my prospecting buddy that’s in his 80’s now. It was a thing we used to do and laugh about while we listened to the rumble of those nuggets in the bottle [our immediate area only has flour gold, nothing that would rumble or growl in a bottle in any way]. I love to keep that tradition alive.)

So, I crawled out of the cut, headed to my quad and pulled a couple of pans out of the rack, grabbed a shovel, then climbed back down. That comb-like rise of bedrock had me intrigued. Even though it hadn’t sounded off with any nuggets, the orientation of those plates made me wonder at how they couldn’t work as a gold trap for finer gold. Well, after prying those sheets apart, then scraping them off and washing any clay and sand into the pans from them, I panned out a couple of grams of fine gold. It took quite a while, but with the pool of water handy, it saved time hauling it to the river.

The gold stopped however where the plates died as they splintered off the hard, solid bedrock underneath, for there were no more spaces between sheets to trap any gold. I’ve run into this lots of times when working friable rock. It’s weathered and loose where it’s been exposed or hammered by stream action, but then it turns solid and un-fractured as you go deeper. Regardless, it had been a while since I’d crawled out of a hole with a nice catch of gold, and it felt right good, yet the summer only got better from there on.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Working those mine sites sounds really interesting Lanny. Unfortunately I have never had that opportunity. Mine has always been unworked ground. And sad to admit, but true, I have not done all that much detector work. I guess my patience level is just too low for it.

Great stories Lanny, thanks again for taking the time to post them.

[Lanny]

Thanks Jim, and I've had the chance to work ground others have worked, whether that be modern day placer excavations, or truly old sites, ones worked by hand in the 1800's. And as you know, nobody ever gets it all, and the beauty of modern electronics is it allows a nugget shooter to see into places the old-timers just couldn't comprehend, and they sure did leave gold behind.

I've found nuggets in virgin ground, and I've also found lots of nuggets in ground disturbed or worked by the old-timers, but lately I've been super lucky to have the chance to work hand-in-hand with current placer operations, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity and their generosity in allowing me to tag along.

I loved to dredge, but now it's almost impossible to get a dredge permit, and I've mined with wash-plants, and some smaller scale equipment too. In addition, when it was allowed, I did some stream sluicing, but now that's a no-no as well now, so I've really specialized in nugget shooting over the last ten years, and I've been lucky enough to have some nice finds.

All the best, and thanks for hosting such a great forum,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Gold Monster Outing

Went to the gold camp in the Rocky Mountains last week. The weather was gorgeous, all kinds of songbirds back, plus the flowers of the mountain meadows are in full bloom, purple crocus and shooting stars, yellow buttercups, multi-coloured Johnny Jump-ups, etc., etc.

At the camp as I was checking over the living quarters (camper and two travel trailers), a humming bird buzzed straight past my right ear! That snappy racket from those wings going a million miles an hour is unmistakable. So, we set out the humming bird feeders hoping to catch a glimpse of the beautiful and dazzling red to orange coloured throat of the Roufus variety before they head farther north, and we’ll keep an eye out for the beautiful iridescent green of the more common ones that stick around all season.

My wife unpacked her shiny new Minelab Gold Monster, and for those of you familiar with the machine, there’s not much reading to do, but I watched a whack of user videos before we hit the mountains so I could give my little darlin’ some tips and guidelines as she set out to learn how to use it.

I picked a spot for her to try her luck on, an old fairly level place in a valley where some placer miners once had their wash-plant. The claim is now abandoned, last worked by some modern-day Chinese miners, but they left the area under a gloomy cloud, and I doubt they’ll ever be back.

I gave my June Bride some general instructions on how to run the Gold Monster (I’d never used one before, but the YouTube and other user-posted videos were a great help. Furthermore, I’d like to give a shout-out to Bill Southern for his wonderful educational efforts.). But, we figured the Monster out quite quickly, and that’s why I’m grateful to Steve Herschbach for recommending I get my sweetheart one due to its ease of use, and kudos to Steve and Jonathan Porter for their write-ups on the machine which helped me quickly get a handle on the basics; their input was invaluable.

By eye-balling the old site, I could tell pretty close to where the Chinese had pulled out their wash-plant, so I used that information to gauge where I’d have my wife start to detect as there are always some “spill” areas that offer a better shot at finding a nugget or two. Having said that, it was easy to see they had bladed and bucketed the area carefully after they were done to gather any spilled material; those miners were no greenhorns.

I blocked off in a rough rectangle an area I thought might pay, and right away, my wife was hitting targets, but they were almost all ferrous, so she kept experimenting toggling back and forth between discriminate and all iron, learning the different sounds, learning how to make it easier to ID targets (to get them to sound off louder), learning how to read the little bar graph when it gave its indication of non-ferrous more than ferrous, as well as getting used to the sounds of shallow vs. deeper targets, and learning how to use the magnet wand to save time while sorting trash signals. (To elaborate, she’s a great panner, but a green, green rookie when it comes to nugget shooting.)

The thing about detecting an old wash-plant set-up is that it gets very easy to quickly tell where the repairs (welds, patches, etc.) took place, and the numerous bits of welding rod sure make for some interesting sounds, and curious readings on the graph! Having said that, the Monster’s discriminator sure came in handy, and yes, depth was lost, but by using the small round coil, target separation was much better, and I was impressed at how my wife was able to move slowly from target to target, separating their locations, as she dug out signals.

While she was test-driving the Monster, I was going for a comfortable cruise with my Gold Bug Pro. That is one hot machine, at least mine is. (I’ve heard detecting folklore that some machines leave the factory “hotter” than others, and I have no idea it that’s true or not, but the one I have is a firecracker for sure, super sensitive, and a true gold hound for sniffing out gold from tiny flakes to meaty nuggets.)

I started to hit non-ferrous targets in one slice of her search area, so I marked a few so she could check them out. Well, those miners had liked their cigarettes, and there were plenty of crumpled bits of foil from the wrappers as well as some other kind of lead foil with a gold-coloured outer covering that made for some increased heartbeat, but only turned out to be a bust.

After having dug some of those duds, she called me over. “Hey, what do you think of this signal?”. She was getting a great reading on the Monster, and it sounded sweet too. She worked the ground for a bit chasing the target around with her scoop (when a target runs from the scoop, it’s usually something heavy, as most ferrous trash seems to hop quickly into the scoop). Dropping the dirt from the scoop onto the coil, she moved things around and there sat a pretty little picker, about a quarter of a gram! Man, was she pumped!!

So, she kept on working that rectangle while I ranged farther afield with the Bug Pro, and I too found all kinds of cigarette foil, and that maddening, thick lead foil with gold coloring--craziest stuff I’ve ever seen, and I have no idea what it originally contained. I recovered a small aluminum parts tag, several electrical connectors, bits of lead, and pieces of broken brass likely from a bushing of some kind.

My wife gave another shout, and over I went. Her meter was pinning consistently in the sweet zone, the signal sound nice and crisp. Capturing the target, she threw the dirt in a gold pan. Next, she then used the Garret Carrot to chase the signal around the pan. She moved some dirt then cried out, “Look at this. Is this gold?” At first, it was hard to tell what it was due to a covering of grey clay, but using a bit of water soon revealed a sassy nugget! If I’d thought she was excited about her first find, it was nothing compared to her reaction on that one!

I can only come to this conclusion: The Minelab Gold Monster is a sweet machine that sure produces sweet results, because it’s so easy to use, and it makes my sweetheart happy (couldn’t resist punning on sweet, forgive me).

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Hydraulic Pit Gold

(I wrote this story a long time ago, but for the rookies, there might be a tip or two . . . )

I was detecting in a hydraulic pit one day, way back when I was using the Minelab 2100 full-time (still a solid gold-finding machine!).

I was finding little brass boot nails, copper wire, blasting caps, old square nails (of all sizes), mine tunnel rail spikes, dozer-blade shavings, cigarette package foil, bits of old tin can (AKA, can-slaw) . . . I was hitting everything but gold!

I wandered over to a rise on the side of the pit where there were some white-barked quaking aspens. It was a sizzling summer day with the patented cobalt blue sky of the Rockies, and that shade in the aspens looked mighty inviting.

From upslope, a cool breeze brought the fragrant scent of fresh, mountain pine.

Having been given the perfect recipe for some relaxation, I sat down and pondered what I'd been up to. The pit was huge, and I'd been hammering the exposed bedrock, and any places where there was any clay deposited tight on the bedrock. (I guess it was good that I'd been finding the junk, as it proved the area wasn't totally hunted out, but I wanted some gold, and I was tired of hitting only junk.)

As I sat in the shade and took a break, I suddenly noticed lots of river rock around the base of the trees, a thing I'd failed to notice before. I looked at the rise above the aspens, and I saw where river rocks were poking from the slope as well. Freshly inspired, I took my shovel and peeled off the surface material to expose even more water-rounded rock.

I fired up the detector and passed it over the rocks and worked my way along the edge of the rise. To my amazement, I got a signal! Of course, I automatically assumed it was another nail, as most of that hydraulic pit could have been refiled on a claim map as a nail mine!

(To elaborate a bit about old nails, I've been fooled by the small tips of square nails before, sometimes they sound just like a nugget. )

Anyway, I dug down and cleared away some of that river rock. The dirt looked like original deposit, undisturbed virgin ground. Furthermore, as I looked at the rise, it made sense. Where I was digging was obviously a small hump of intact old channel, a piece left by the hydraulic miners. The only clue as to why it had been left was that perhaps due to all of the nails at the base of the hump, there must have been some sort of building there that they didn't want to take out with the water cannons.

At any rate, I kept digging, and the signal got stronger. Pretty soon, about eight inches down, I saw bedrock. I passed the coil over the spot and the sound was nice and sweet.

This was shale bedrock, with lots of fractures packed with clay, and lots of small river stones tight on as well as jammed down into it. I pinpointed the signal and carefully scraped down through the clay and small stones. There on the bedrock was a sassy nugget! It was very flat, but shaped just like the sole of a shoe, about the size of a Barbie Doll boot, only thicker, and somewhat larger.

Naturally, I decided to detect the area more, but I got blanked.

But then came the thing that can stop a nugget hunter cold, the battle over whether to strip more overburden to expose the bedrock. (Was this a lone nugget, or could there be some pals somewhere?)

I've faced this decision many times while throwing off hundreds of pounds of annoying rock, only to find nothing. But, the place had a good feel to it, plus the shade was a nice bonus, so I decided to tear into it.

(As a side note, my buddy invented a slick rock fork that I had with me that day. He took a manure-fork and heated the tines and bent them about halfway down their length at a right angle. Then he cut the sharp tips off, leaving safe, blunt ends. This is a dream tool for raking off river rock from hillsides and bedrock, the long handle making the work easier. Plus, any heavies like gold will fall through the tines and stay put.)

Using the repurposed fork, I found that the overburden varied from about six inches to a foot, and the rocks varied from cobbles to watermelon-sized boulders.

At last I'd cleared an area about the size of two half-ton truck beds. It took a lot of work, but I'd produced a nice patch of exposed bedrock that had the same covering of clay and small river stone as the previous spot that had given up a nugget.

I ran the coil over the area and got no signal at all! I slowed down and ran it perpendicular to the way I'd detected it the first time. This time I got a whisper. I hauled out some sniping tools, went to work, and the signal was slightly louder.

I used a stiff-bristled brush and scrubbed the bedrock. I detected the spot again, and the signal was nice and repeatable. I got out a bent, slot screwdriver (end bent at 90 degrees), and I worked that bedrock hard. It started to break off in flakes, and small sheets, and my efforts exposed a crevice! I dug down deeper and the crevice got a bit wider, then little stones packed in a wet, dark-stained sandy clay started popping out; this can be a very good sign, even with a crevice being narrow.

I ran the edge of the coil along the crevice and the sound was definitely crisper. I took out a small sledge from my pack and a wide, thin rock chisel. I cut down on either side of the signal in that bedrock crevice, then I slanted back toward the heart of the crevice itself, breaking out the rock and exposing the contents of the little pocket. I scraped all of the material out of the crevice and put it in a plastic scoop. I ran it under the coil and was rewarded with a nice smooth, crisp sound.

I sorted the scoop's material under the coil to reveal a flat nugget, its body still wedged in between two pieces of bedrock. Moreover, because that little rascal had been standing on its edge, that was why it had been so stealthy in the crevice!

I cleaned along the rest of the crevice and found two more nuggets, smaller than the first and second nuggets, but nice to have nonetheless.

I went back to the same spot a couple of weeks later and really cleared off a large section of that hump. You'd have been proud to see the rocks fly that day; nonetheless, I found no more gold.

Isn't that the way it goes?

All the best,

Lanny
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[Jim_Alaska]

Nice story Lanny. You were right also, there was a tip for me. Nugget shooting has always been hard for me because I just do not seem to have the patience for things such as you just described. Over the years I have found that the best nugget hunters not only have the best equipment, they also have lots of patience and "stick to it".

[Lanny]

As always Jim, many thanks for reading the story and for your kind comment.

Moreover, as always, I appreciate your input and insight. If I ever learn half of what you've forgotten about chasing the gold, I'll feel lucky. You're miles ahead of me in the knowledge department about how to get the gold, so I feel honoured that you invited me to join your fine forum.

All the best,

Lanny